The main space for TORC-based Lord of the Rings Online Kinship members and aspirants to join, accept applications for membership, gather, speak, sing, loot, make decisions, and generally take themselves too seriously.

You would think after so many updates and add-ons that Turbine would have figured out how to do this. But no. Connecting takes forever. When you finally do connect you're stuck at examining game data. After you do manage to download the patches several hours later, they turn out to be corrupted, giving you the message of "Unable to decrypt and deserialize the data downloaded from the server". Search the web for a solution. It suggests deleted various files from your computer. You then start over again from the beginning.

You would indeed think they'd have learned, from other MMOs. This was figured out by Blizzard at least four years ago: download most of the new stuff beforehand, in the background. "Exceptionally high demand" -- no %@$&, Sherlock. If you make everyone download the new stuff at once, that will happen.

At LEAST when you're stuck in the queue for patch servers or authentication servers, put up the number of people ahead of you. Again, Blizzard did that years ago.

Bloody idiots.

On the positive side, I did not run into a corrupted file problem (at least I don't think I did, as I got to the authentication stage). Just about 5 hours trying to patch, and now several more trying to authenticate.

They did used to have the "download this first" option, so on patch day you'd spend some time applying that and then just apply patches on top of that. They had some problems with it though and dropped it. Maybe they'll bring it back in the future, especially now that EU servers are integrated.

They also had a bittorrent style of downloads as well but that was a disaster (they used third party software).

I did hear that when Warcraft's latest expansion came out that it was nearly as chaotic.